"It seems to me that to organize on the basis of feeding people or righting social injustice and all that is very valuable. But to rally people around the idea of modernism, modernity, or something is simply silly. I mean, I don't know what kind of a cause that is, to be up to date. I think it ultimately leads to fashion and snobbery and I'm against it."
Jack Levine: January 3, 1915 – November 8, 2010

Friday, June 16, 2017

It's Not A Good Sign Of The Times When Things Are Called What They're Not

It wasn't a brawl and it wasn't important enough in context to make me pursue the argument but I felt I had to contradict an atheist elsewhere who wanted to blame Christianity for the leader of the pedophilia ring allowed to masquerade as a church (due to our short-sighted founders and the minor 18th century prose of the Constitution) Lyle Jeffs who was arrested the other day.

I challenged the broad brush painter to show how you could intuit the Gospel of Jesus from the words and actions of the pedophiles who run the ring pretending to be a religion for the protection of their criminal ring of rapists of each others children.

That's a challenge that isn't made often enough, to match the words and acts of those who claim, not only religious but any identity as a definition of what they're about. I mentioned in the short exchange that there was no way you could intuit the political philosophy of Abraham Lincoln from Donald Trump - or Jesus for that matter. As to Trump's "Christianity" located in time for inclusion in his presidential campaign, I read that he was so informed about it that he had to ask a pastor of "his" Presbyterian denomination if they were Christians. As an adult. Many decades after his confirmation into "his faith".

I often pointed out the ironies of George W. Bush, a man who assumed the presidency as a result of an election rigged in Florida, a state run by his brother, installed by partisan Republican "Justices" on the Supreme Court in an unprecedented act of bald political usurpation of the right of the voters to their ballots determining who was president, lied the country into invading Iraq so as to allegedly install democracy through an invasion by a foreign country, opposed by what was almost certainly a majority of the country - if not then, not long into the disastrous occupation. And as he and his Republican Party made a whole sale attack on our elections and the ability of people to cast a vote. An effort which has not only continued but which has increased in an effort to reinstall a de facto Jim Crow system extending far outside of where it was before it was overturned in 1965.

The use of labels which people attach a positive association with to do some really evil things is something that should be criticized and the hypocrisy of it, attacked. It really does matter. I know it became not only unfashionable but outré, certainly in matters religious, more, I think, a symptom of the diminution of how seriously religion is held than anything else. But also in matters of civil life, politics, the law, etc. The American mass media has had a huge role in that, gaming the use of labels politically to the advantage of the class they serve. It was certainly not in the interest of the Republicans in the 1980s and after to point out that the Fundamentalists like Falwell, Robertson, and others were phonies whose every action and whose words exposed them as frauds, more suited as ministers of the anti-Christ than as people who promoted the Gospel and the teachings of Jesus. I think the role that that had in making "Christian" a dirty word is far greater than I've ever read discussed. I think the new atheism was able to take advantage of the opportunity given to them by the spectacle of what a bunch of hypocrites such "Christians" were and are.

If Christians don't disavow the likes of Lyle Jeff and his cult of pedophiles it doesn't do anything to elevate the status of Christianity. I think it's time that we stopped pretending that the First Amendment applies to anything but the government in its official actions, policies and laws. I don't think there is anything good that is going to come out of taking that excuse to avoid the unpleasantness that will arise from the truth about that being told. As in my argument on that point, not doing so gives an opportunity to those who want the real thing to go away. They apply the word "Christian to"the kind of fraud that can pass off pedophile abuse as Christianity when Jesus said it was deserving of worse than having a millstone put around your neck and being drowned, of not having been born. He didn't mince words on that count, neither should we.

On Comments

This is a blog for adults and I intend to keep it that way.

I've been forced to go back to moderating comments since some people abused the privilege. Adulthood confers privileges that childishness shouldn't. Please be patient, barring accidents, any comment that should be posted will be.

ABOUT MUSIC VIDEOS

I post music videos to inspire you to support living, working musicians, to buy their recordings so they can continue with their music and to buy the recordings of artists who have passed so their music will be preserved and available into the future.

About Me

I am a gay man, a religious man, an equality absolutist, a democrat, and a primitive socialist who believes that the means of production are by right in the ownership of those who produce wealth. I am an environmentalist of the extreme kind who is convinced that the way things are going now will lead to the extinction of people, of many other species of life for the benefit of a pathologically greedy elite who must be stopped and leveled with the rest of us. If that's not radical enough, I believe that reality is real and that most of what gets called liberalism and leftism in the United States is an impotent fraud based in fashion and the conceit of a bunch of elitists who delight in despising people they consider beneath them. Thus the political impotence of that style of pseudo-liberalism which is merely a liberalish-libertarianism. My heroes include Shirley Chisholm, Martin Luther King jr. the liberation theologians, and a few politicians, Senator Whitehouse and Sanders, many of the members of the Congressional progressive and black caucuses and other politicians who actually struggle to change laws and make real lives really better.

On Being Disreputable

After seven years of being told that what I've said is beyond the bounds of ... something, they're hardly ever specific, and that I'm just awful, I've decided to go with that.